1. Field of the Invention
This invention is related to the field of storage management and, more particularly, to software used in storage management.
2. Description of the Related Art
Computer systems typically include storage devices (or are coupled to access storage devices through, e.g., a network) for storing the software to be executed on the computer system, the data to be operated on by the software, and/or the data resulting from the execution of the software by the computer system. Growth continues in the amount of storage that is included in computer systems or to which computer systems have access. Additionally, different types of storage (e.g. network attached storage (NAS), storage area networks (SAN), etc.) continue to be developed and expanded.
In order to manage the use and operation of the storage devices, various storage management software has been developed. For example, file system software, volume managers, volume replicators, etc. have been developed to help effectively manage storage devices. Typically, such storage management software includes one or more modules of code that are included xe2x80x9cinsidexe2x80x9d the operating system (executing with operating system privileges and/or interfacing closely with other operating system code). Thus, such storage management software requires the support of, or at least the permission of, the operating system vendors who make the operating systems for the computer systems on which the storage management software is to execute.
In many cases, the storage management software may be made available on several different operating system platforms. In these cases, different versions of the software must be maintained for each different operating system. Additionally, each time a given operating system changes, the corresponding version often must be modified and retested (and in some cases, recertified by the operating system vendor).
In the case of open source operating systems (e.g. Linux), the module that is incorporated in the operating system (and sometimes other parts of the storage management software) must be open-sourced for inclusion in the operating system. Thus, at least a portion of the storage management software becomes publicly available.
In the extreme, the operating system vendor may drop support/permission with regard to subsequently developed versions of the operating system. Additionally, the module may have to make use of unpublished application programming interfaces (APIs), which may be changed more freely and/or more often by the operation system vendor (and thus may require more frequent changes to the module and/or the storage management software as a whole).
A storage management system is provided. In one embodiment, the storage management system is configured to provide one or more virtual storage devices for use by an operating system. The storage management system is configured to map files representing the virtual storage devices to a plurality of volumes to be stored on physical storage devices. In various embodiments, the storage management system may include storage management components (e.g. a file system, a volume manager, a volume replicator, or a hierarchical storage manager) which manage the files representing the virtual storage devices.
In one implementation, a storage management system may include one or more storage management components and may be configured to provide one or more virtual storage devices for use by the operating system. The storage management system may support a set of storage commands for the virtual storage devices. The set of storage commands may include: (i) a set of standard commands used by the operating system to communicate with storage devices, and (ii) one or more additional commands for communicating with the storage management components.
In another embodiment, a storage management system may be configured to schedule various applications/operating systems for execution on multiple processing hardware. The storage management system may be configured to present a consistent view of storage for a given application/operating system, independent of which of the multiple processing hardware on which the application/operation system is executing. In some embodiments, the application/operating system may be executing within a complete virtual machine.